


Recognition

by h0ldthiscat



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, X Files Revival, possible spoilers?, revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 09:30:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4132465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h0ldthiscat/pseuds/h0ldthiscat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tonight is all about her, his Scully, though he knows with surety that she’s never belonged to him and she never will. She belongs to him as much as she belongs to the elements, to earth, to air, to fire, but most of all to water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recognition

**Author's Note:**

> Since news of the revival was announced in March, I haven't consciously sought out spoilers but I haven't avoided them either. In fact, I clicked on one article that had spoilers, read five paragraphs, and then decided I wanted to be surprised. Because I've read a lot of X Files stuff since then, I genuinely cannot remember if what happens at the end of my story here was an idea I got from a spoiler I read for the revival, or if it was someone's headcanon and we were speculating as to "what if..." 
> 
> That being said, you've been warned, HERE BE (potential) SPOILERS. Enjoy!

He looks over her shoulder where she sits at her desk, tapping the end of a pen to her lips, hair and makeup done but still in her bathrobe. A tiny pink splotch has formed on the cap of the pen where it repeatedly makes contact with her plump bottom lip. She looks like a goddamn painting sometimes. 

“They’re making you give a speech? That’s just cruel and unusual.” 

“You’re telling me.” She furrows her brow, seeing him only in boxers and a t-shirt. “You’re not dressed yet.”

“Sorry, I forgot the dress code was bathroom chic,” he teases.

“I was waiting for you to get out of the shower so you could zip me up,” she counters, rising to the wardrobe where her dress hangs limply off a hanger. “Will you?” she asks, looking over her shoulder and loosening the belt of her robe.

He steps toward her wordlessly, taking her robe as it falls from her shoulders and depositing it on the bed. She steps into the dress feet first, the slightly beaded fabric making quiet clinks against the hardwood floor of their bedroom.

“Don’t you need--”

“I don’t wear underwear with this dress,” she says simply as the dress slides up over her hips. 

“Right.” He ignores the tightness in his throat and his boxers and helps her bring the thin black garment up over her shoulders. The fabric clings to her slim curves, capped sleeves hugging her shoulders, the elegant lines of the dress swooping low on her back, coming to rest just below her ass. Her back is bare.

“Hey,” he says against the back of her neck, just below her scar, “there’s no zipper on this dress.”

“Gotcha.” She whispers it over her shoulder and he feels her breath on his cheek, soft and smelling of toothpaste and the loose powder makeup dusted across her nose and cheeks. 

She kisses him softly, turning in his arms, impossibly small in her bare feet. He holds her gently, like she is glass, like she is a moonbeam, and she brings her hands to his face and strokes a gentle thumb over his cheek. 

When she pulls away, her thumb rubs roughly on his upper lip. “Lipstick,” she mumbles.

“I should get dressed,” he says, not moving.

“Yes,” she agrees, fiddling with the neckline of his undershirt.

“You okay?” he asks, pushing a strand of hair back from her face, careful not to disturb the updo she’s clearly spent a lot of time on.

“Been in my head all day,” she sighs, quiet. 

“What’s up, doc?”

She hums into the smile that spreads across her face. “I thought I said you only get one of those a year.”

“I’ve never been a rule follower, Scully, you know that.”

“I do indeed.”

X  
He remembers very little between the time he gets dressed and the time they call Scully’s name at the ceremony; he becomes slowly aware of thunderous applause, like the transition from one scene to the next in a movie.

Had they held hands in the car? Did they take the interstate or backroads? Had they driven themselves here or had the hospital sent a car? This and other questions Fox Mulder can’t answer when she’s wearing that dress, tonight at 11, he thinks wryly, standing to applaud as those around him do so as well. 

“Thank you,” she says quietly into the microphone, barely audible over the still loud rumble of laudation. She won’t raise her voice, he knows. She hates these things, has been invited to a few of them since her time at the hospital. She always goes begrudgingly, comes home distant and melancholy and smokes a cigarette out on the front porch, wrapped around herself in the rocking chair.

Tonight is not some benefit, though. Tonight is not some donor recognition event. Tonight honors her contributions to medicine, celebrates the success of her clinical trial and subsequent conclusions drawn from it. Tonight is all about her, his Scully, though he knows with surety that she’s never belonged to him and she never will. She belongs to him as much as she belongs to the elements, to earth, to air, to fire, but most of all to water. 

“Thank you,” she says again, only slightly louder, and people finally begin to take their seats. She grips the front ledge of the podium tightly--he can tell even from two tables back--but she does not teeter on her spiked shoes. 

“I can’t tell you how honored I am to receive this recognition from the hospital and the board of directors,” she begins perfunctorily, without a flourish or joke, but then she has never been one to pander. “I came late to a career in medicine, after serving for nine years as a special agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

There is a small murmur; spouses who didn’t know this detail about the woman before them find the need to comment at once, but Scully doesn’t seem deterred. Mulder watches her with prideful anticipation and a small knot in his stomach. He hadn’t expected her to mention the FBI at all.

“While my medical knowledge was put to the test daily at the Bureau, I was certainly lacking in critical areas once I decided to practice medicine again. I began the lengthy and arduous process of becoming a board-certified surgeon. Some of the exam adjudicators were younger than I was and the med students kept looking at me like I wasn’t supposed to be there. It was intimidating, to say the least.”

A small, assenting rumble of laughter goes through the crowd of mostly doctors, all reminiscing about their own certifications, hours spent pacing in hotel room hallways waiting to be called in, mouthing facts they’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to memorize.

“But I brought to the table something I think most of the other aspiring surgeons didn’t,” she continues. “Respect for the unknown.” 

There is silence, and Mulder can’t tell if it’s out of confusion or anticipation. 

“I spent the majority of my time at the Bureau working on cases that were referred to as x-files. In short: the unexplained, the mysterious, the paranormal. And in those nine years, I saw things.” For the first time she looks down at the scrawled page of notes she’d been working on at home. For the first time her voice falters in its surety. “I… experienced things that couldn’t be explained by traditional scientific practices and knowledge. And it was in my struggle to understand them, to  
categorize them, that I found discontent. 

“I am a scientist. I seek rational, logical explanations for everything I encounter. It was for this exact reason that I was assigned to those cases in the first place. But now, I can safely say that I am done searching for answers to questions that don’t want to be asked.”

There is a noticeable murmur now, and it is one of dissent. Is she retiring?, they all mouth to each other. Is she retiring? Mulder wonders himself. 

“I know what you’re thinking,” she says, a small smile tucked in the corner of her mouth. “I’m not stepping down. I am merely admitting to you that which has taken me so long to accept myself: that these discoveries and answers I’m being lauded for, these honors I am being presented with tonight, did not come to me because I sought them out. Rather, they were revealed to me when I stopped looking for them.”

A grin spreads across Mulder’s face and he wants to run up to the podium and hug her, crush her in a bear hug, then pick her up and twirl her around like in the movies. Then she continues and he thinks he falls in love with her all over again.

“A wise person once told me that dreams are the answers to questions we haven’t yet figured out how to ask. If that’s true, and I think it is, the discoveries I made over the course of this clinical trial weren’t discoveries. They weren’t... something I saw under a microscope in a lab late at night with half of a deli sandwich going stale in a box next to me. They weren’t Mendel in a greenhouse or Franklin’s nucleotides and diffraction photographs. They were answers that came to me when I  
wasn’t looking for them. They were revealed to me.”

The room has fallen silent again. He can tell she’s eager to return to her seat. “Again, thank you to the board and the hospital for this incredible honor. Thank you to the rest of the surgical staff, for being the most supportive group of coworkers. And…” She pauses, looks down at her notes, he thinks he sees her smile. “Thank you to my partner. I love you.”

The room is plunged into applause again as two members of the board join her at the podium and present her with an oddly-shaped glass award; two or three cameras flash, she gives a polite smile. He is grinning so widely he can barely see.

X

Mulder knocks softly on her office door and she looks up from staring absently at something, a piece of hair slipping from behind her ear. 

“Hey,” he says. His voice is gravelly and he clears his throat. 

“Hey.” Her smile is sweet and apologetic. “Needed a minute,” she says.

“I figured.” He crosses the small room to her and places a hand on her waist, a kiss on her temple. “It’s a lot.”

“A whole lot,” she agrees with a nod. “But it’s also… so meaningless. Mulder, these people don’t know me. Who I really am. What I’ve done in my life besides conduct some basically insignificant clinical trial.”

“Nothing you do is ever insignificant.” He gives her hip a gentle squeeze and sits in her desk chair. 

She smiles without showing her teeth. “You’re sweet.” She’s come to rest on the corner of her desk, supporting her weight back on her palms. For a moment he can’t look away from her breasts. Then she says, “Do you think he’d be proud of me?”

He furrows his brow. They haven’t talked about her father in-- “Your dad?”

Her confused expression matches his for a moment, is replaced with embarrassment, and then sorrow. “No. No, not him.”

“Then--”

She looks at him, her bottom lip pressing up ever-so-slightly into her top, a sign he has learned means that she is trying not to cry. And then he understands. 

He would have been fourteen this week.

“He’d be crazy about you,” Mulder says, his voice gravelly again when he finds it, and this time he doesn’t try to fix it. “He’d brag to all the kids at school about what a badass doctor his mom is.”

She’s looking down at her desk but he sees her smile. She picks at something on her desk, the edge of a sticky note that he’d left for her months ago, scribbled in red sharpie: See you at home. 

“He’s the only guy in the world that loves you more than I do.” It breaks his heart to think that it’s true, but he knows it.

“Mulder, he doesn’t even know who I am.” 

“I don’t believe that, Scully.”

She laughs and looks down into her lap. “Who thought you’d ever say that to me?” she teases, smiling even though her eyes are wet. She doesn’t want to cry tonight, he thinks. 

“Congratulations, Dr. Scully,” he says, and places a hand on her thigh and shifts to kiss her. She bends her head so he doesn’t have to reach far and runs a hand across the side of his face, settling into a soft scratch above his ear. 

“I’m not a dog, Scully,” he says when they part. 

“You look like one,” she pouts, eyes still teary but shining now, appreciative. Thankful. “With those big eyes of yours.”

“You sure know how to make a guy feel special.”

“You heard what my colleagues said about my bedside manner.” 

“Yeah, about that… I’d like to give them a firsthand account of your bedside manner. Every last detail.”

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” She lets him slip a hand up her dress and rest his warm palm on the back of her knee, stroking with his thumb just enough to drive her mad. 

“I would indeed,” he nods, and pulls her down for another kiss.

“Dr. Scully, they’d like you to-- Oh, I’m sorry!” 

Before they can even process what’s happened, Scully’s tawny-haired intern has already entered and left the room, her face redder than Scully’s hair. 

“It’s okay Jana,” Scully calls, giving Mulder’s shoulder a sheepish squeeze. 

The door creaks back open and Jana peeks in, looking at the floor. She’s tall and thin and young, so young. The age Scully was when they first met, he thinks. 

“They, uh, they’re about to do a photo op, they need you back.”

“Come on,” Scully says, squeezing his wrist. “Thanks Jana.”

He releases his hold on her knee and they both rise, brushing past the intern in the doorway. A photographer and a few of the members of the board are waiting outside, ready to pose beside the nurses’ station. Mulder stands back with Jana as the camera flashes, adding insult to injury under the already harsh, fluorescent lights of the hallway.

“She’s amazing,” Jana mumbles from beside him, and then blushes when he looks at her sidelong. “Sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing?” Mulder asks, slightly amused. 

“We kind of all thought you were going to be a woman,” Jana admits. 

He chuckles. “Excuse me?”

“She’s always saying ‘my partner,’” Jana explains. “We just kind of assumed that was her way of saying she was with a girl.”

Mulder laughs disbelievingly. “Seriously?”

“Please don’t tell her!” Jana urges. “Please, she would die if she knew we talked about-- I don’t even know why I said anything.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” he promises.

“Mulder.” 

He looks up. Scully is opening and closing her hand for him, asking him to join her in the picture. As he presses a palm against the small of her back and smiles for the camera, he is reminded of how physically small she really is. 

X

She holds his hand in the car on the way home and all the way up the driveway into the house. He waits until she is illuminated by the greenish-yellow glow of the refrigerator in their otherwise dark kitchen, pulling two beers out for them, to tell her.

“Your interns thought you were dating a woman.”

She furrows her brow but doesn’t seem overly surprised. “Why?”

“Because you always say ‘my partner’, apparently.”

“Well what am I supposed to say?” She pops the tops off on the edge of the countertop and passes him his beer. 

They’ve had varying versions of this conversation before: her insistence that she didn’t need or want for them to be married, his humor and reticence at being called anyone’s boyfriend at his age. They’d thought about it once or twice but it was one of those things that didn’t seem to matter anymore, like how she sometimes used his shampoo in the shower or how he always forgot to unload the dishwasher.

“I guess I’m just surprised that you don’t talk about me at work,” he says, mostly kidding.

“Are you trying to start a fight with me?” She takes a sip of her beer and descends the height of a full escalator step as she steps out of her heels. 

“No,” he admits.

“Then don’t worry about it.” She slips her hand inside his and they move to the living room in the dark, settle on the couch. 

“I liked your speech.”

“Thank you.”

She is on him quickly, forearms resting on his shoulders, knees bracketing his hips as she kisses him insistently, hungrily, with strong, deep breaths and perfumed exhales. He quickly sets his bottle down on the side table and brings his hands to her face, always soft and always hard. 

“Does being an award-winning surgeon turn you on, Scully, or are you just--”

“Shut up, Mulder.”

He helps her slide her dress down her shoulders, and she leans into his hand, her cheek warm against his fingers, still chilled from the neck of his beer bottle. He lets the fabric pool in her lap and cups one of her breasts, then the other. 

“Yes,” she whispers as he rolls her nipple between his fingers. “Yes.” 

She kisses him again, fingers sliding down his chest and then back up, making quick work of his tie. He’d picked a conservative one, something patterned that every average dad would have on reserve for Easter dinners and graduations. He was a father, once. 

Maybe she remembers this as she pulls on the tie affectionately, one thumb threading gently over the silk. He thinks he sees a tear slip down her cheek; it’s dark, hard to tell. 

“Are you okay?” he asks. 

“No.” Her voice cracks and she covers her face with her hands but doesn’t make a sound.

He gathers her close to him, her bare chest pressing to the crisp front of his dress shirt, and she curls a hand against the collar. Her shoulders shake quietly, her breasts bobbing against him with her soundless sobs. Mulder smoothes his big hands down her bare back, knowing that in these moments she is not comforted by sweet sibilants, like most people; she wants, he knows, to just be held, to grasp at the only thing that feels solid to her. 

He loves and hates that it’s him.

“Take off for a few days,” he says after a few moments, after her body has stilled and there is nothing but her shallow breathing against his skin. “We’ll go somewhere we’ve never been before.”

She laughs softly into his ear. “Where’s that? Hawaii?”

It’s true; together they’ve been to every state except Hawaii. But they have been to Puerto Rico, so maybe they can do a sub-in, he thinks. 

Their house phone rings suddenly, the tinny electric sound bouncing off the walls. She snorts against his neck, places a kiss there, and then whispers against his lips, “Leave it.”

He smiles and flips them so she’s flat on her back on the couch, the top of her dress still gathered around her midsection. He takes off his suit jacket, and their fingers fumble together on the buttons of his shirt. 

The machine beeps, picks up. The voice that comes through the small speaker is at once familiar but unplaceable until the caller identifies himself.

“Hi, this message is for Agents Mulder and Scully.”

Mulder pauses in freeing himself from his t-shirt. No one’s called either of them Agent in years. 

“I hope this is a safe, secure way to contact you. Walter Skinner said it would be. Um, I met you several years ago, I think you’ll remember me. My name is Gibson Praise.”

Scully shoots up and contorts her body to look over her shoulder at the answering machine. She doesn’t pick up, but stares at the machine like it could bite her at any moment. 

“I was recently contacted by a boy who is looking for you. He said his name was Will Van Camp.”

Scully covers her mouth with her hand and Mulder feels a stone drop in his stomach. 

The voice on the answering machine continues. “I’m not sure if that name means anything to you, but he seemed very badly to want to talk to you and seemed to think that I could help. I… I don’t want to say too much over the phone, I’d like to meet in person if it’s all right. Call me back at this number after 9pm. Thanks. Uh, bye.”

Mulder is not sure how long they sit frozen like that, her half-naked and he with his tie in his hand. But when they finally move to look at each other, the second her eyes find his, he knows her answer. And he knows that it is the same as his.


End file.
